How Mobile is Transforming the Customer Journey

My last post discussed a question posed at our most recent Harte Hanks Marketing Advisory Board meeting: is there still a need for brick and mortar? The Advisory Board members went on to discuss how mobile is transforming the customer journey.

Americans check their phones 8 billion times a day. This is an aggregate of all Americans and demonstrates how much we use and rely on our devices. There is even a psychological term for mobile phone addiction: nomophobia.

Mobile phones are radically changing how we interact with our friends, family and products/services. With all this growth and usage, marketers are struggling to understand what that mobile interaction should look like—in fact, many of us are still treating mobile like a laptop.

At our last advisory board meeting, Kay Lemon, Ph.D., discussed some important differences, like touch and voice command.

A major challenge to this relatively new interaction platform is the low conversion rates, as compared to on a PC or in store. Tami Mohney of Modell’s points out that while most of their content is initially viewed on mobile, those viewers don’t convert in that mobile moment.

Tami posed the question, why is it so difficult to convert on mobile? Have we not developed a user experience that allows people to easily complete a purchase on mobile? Or is there another element to the journey that we do not yet fully understand?

The solution to these questions is to first understand the holistic buyer’s journey and how mobile fits into the journey. We need to start thinking of mobile as different than a laptop—there is an intrinsic difference in what a mobile device can do, and we should acknowledge that and treat it as a new way to interact. We saw the same thing when agencies moved from TV and print advertising to digital; they just put the same ads on digital, which didn’t work.

Instead of replicating the PC on a mobile device, we should be asking how we can leverage the mobile platform in its own unique way.

About the Author

Jon Dome, VP of Customer Engagement, specializes in marketing strategy and customer experience management. He has a strong track record building and sustaining high performance client satisfaction teams. Jon leverages the Jobs-to-be-Done methodologies popularized by Tony Ulwick and Clayton Christensen to underpin new frameworks for marketers to optimize buyer’s journeys. A motivational team leader and an articulate communicator, Jon has a talent for driving customer-centric cultures.